Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Landscape Suicide
1987 · James Benning · Landscape Suicide on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the empty street stay on screen after nothing happens. (camera)
Benning holds a locked shot of an ordinary place, a sprinkler, a parked car, long after you've taken in all the information it offers.
Payoff: The shot forces you to look at a place for its own sake, with no action waiting to happen in it. In the reading: espace quelconque. The reading calls this an any-space-whatever: a place that has stopped being the backdrop for someone's action.
Notice how different the color feels in each half. (light)
California gives you dry hills and pale flat light, Wisconsin gives you snow, bare trees, and low gray sky, and the film never explains the switch.
Payoff: The two climates argue that violence is not one thing but a set of local conditions.
Listen for the total absence of music. (sound)
Wind, birds, traffic, and machinery fill the landscape passages, but no score ever tells you when to feel dread or relief.
Payoff: Without music cueing your reaction, whatever unease you feel is something you supplied yourself.
Watch the speaker sit centered, facing straight at the camera. (staging)
Both performers are locked in frame addressing an interrogator you never see, given the same flat, undescriptive space as a hillside or a farmhouse.
Payoff: You end up sitting in the interrogator's chair, with no one on screen to stand in for you.
Notice the flat, recitation-like delivery of both speakers. (performance)
Rhonda Bell and Elion Sacker speak case language with affect withheld, their rhythm just off natural speech, so you stay aware someone else's words are being said.
Payoff: The flatness keeps you from mistaking a recitation for a confession you actually understand.
Once you have seen it
Notice the hard cut from a road straight to a face. (cutting)
Benning never dissolves between a landscape block and a testimony block, he just cuts, leaving you to supply the connection the editing refuses to make.
Payoff: The two images sit side by side rather than explaining each other, and the joining becomes your work. In the reading: interstice / the "AND". The reading calls this an irrational cut: two images related by the gap between them rather than by continuity.
Notice you never see or hear the interrogator asking. (performance)
Both confessions answer a question you never hear asked by a person you never see, so the testimony hangs in the room addressed only to you.
Payoff: The words are testimony performed at you, not dialogue between two people you can watch. In the reading: acte de parole. The reading calls this a speech act, a testifying voice rather than dialogue, answerable only to the viewer in the chair.
Notice that neither murder is ever staged or shown. (structure)
Both halves cut around the killing itself, leaving a gap at the center that the landscape shots and testimony are arranged to circle rather than fill.
Payoff: The film gives you everything around the crime and nothing of the crime, which is the whole method.
Carry this in: Watch the held shots as evidence, not scenery, the way Benning wants you to read the ground like a transcript.